Silver Trak helped Nine establish a secure branded portal to host, promote and control access to Nine’s video assets for media partners including DRM, watermarking and authentication.
Australian media company Nine Entertainment markets its content through their Nine Media Room website where reviewers and media contacts can access pre-release assets such as videos, images and programme synopses. A short time ago, realising that the site lacked modern security features, effective branding and a straightforward, engaging viewing process, Nine’s marketing team began considering alternatives for an upgrade.
Nine’s Group Enterprise Architect for IT Matthew Benson said, “We investigated systems that other members of the Nine group were using, as well as those that our competitors use. We wanted to establish a secure branded portal to host and control access to Nine’s video assets for media partners.”
Securing Content Management and Access
Security was the main priority. To meet Nine’s requirements, the new system had to integrate secure playback, enable studio grade DRM (digital rights management) and dynamic per-user watermarking. As well as login permissions, the site needed multi-factor authentication and multi-level user permissions.
Beyond up-to-date security features, the new Media Room was to present potential clients with a simple mechanism for viewing assets externally, which would involve rebuilding the user interface and backend features. In effect, Nine wanted to support internal users to upload, curate and manage content and ultimately, finely control access – that is, allow each authorised client to playback and view only a particular set of content.
Searching assets
Silver Trak Digital’s own cloud-based Media Room software and services are the foundation of the new client platform. Silver Trak COO Christian Christiansen said, “Media Room gives Nine Entertainment much more functionality – for its internal users and for clients.
“Now, the company’s staff or other permitted contributors upload content into Media Room where they can use its features for media management, tagging and assembling video into viewable assets. When complete, assets can be saved or immediately published to the Nine Media Room website, and further content can be added at any time.”
Inside Media Room
During their evaluation of available services, software and providers, Nine realised that not all media asset management systems are created equal. A modern system with an integrated DRM and a secure portal for users to log into, Media Room serves as a comprehensive, standalone cloud-based tool, instead of referring users to plug-ins or proprietary apps.
Digital rights management tools
Matt said, “All the systems we looked at support custom development, but Silver Trak’s Media Room was the only one that included security like DRM and per recipient watermarking. We thus eliminated the less secure systems, others that were expensive with a lot of features we didn't need or, in the case of screener platforms, didn't have the ability to host mixed content on the Nine site. Media Room software, however, met all of our requirements.”
Per-recipient, or dynamic, watermarking embeds an invisible code into digital content. The code includes identifying data about the recipient, in case assets are leaked, and may also alter dynamically over time or in response to certain situations.
An essential aspect of media distribution, DRM concerns file encryption and user authentication. Having DRM integrated into Media Room – all cloud-based – is very efficient. Cloud DRM starts at the encoding stage when source files are both encoded into adaptive streaming formats, and encrypted with media keys. The files can then be stored, ready for access. The client’s player communicates with the DRM server to check validity (authentication), after which the player can unencrypt and play the video.
Getting Competitive
As mentioned, Nine also wanted to brand their clients’ interactions with the site. Doing this would present their video assets in a way that aligned with the company’s brand guidelines, and add useful content describing the productions or shows to which they belonged. For this reason, Silver Trak includes tools for creating campaigns to promote users’ assets.
Similar in purpose to any other ad campaign, these promotions accompany screeners to make the content more competitive when used with a public release to specific audiences. Like Media Room’s other services, the campaigns are secured behind DRM, delivered with dynamic watermarking and controllable regarding number of views and availability, making them trackable.
From a separate Admin portal, Nine's publicity team can design the look of their screener promos based on their own artwork, and add logos, banners, posters and email content. To monitor campaign results, a reporting module verifies who received the content, who opened it, number of plays, download information and so on. www.silvertrak.com.au
